Paleographers, riches await you!
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"Hefty award offered for deciphering oracle bone characters" (China Daily, 10/28/16):
The National Museum of Chinese Writing on Thursday launched an award program to encourage people from around the world to help decipher oracle bone inscriptions.
According to the museum based in Anyang City in central China's Henan Province, where oracle bones and script were discovered from the Ruins of Yin over 110 years ago, the program will offer 100,000 yuan ($14,700) for each unknown character to be deciphered.
Inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones represent the original characters of the Chinese written language. They date back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC).
Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used writing system in the world. The logograms convey both meaning and pronunciation.
To date, archaeologists around the world have discovered some 4,000 bone inscription characters by studying 160,000 relics, but only 1,600 of the characters have been deciphered.
The oracle bone script (jiǎgǔ wén 甲骨文), which dates to around 1200 BC, represents the first-known stage of the Chinese writing system. Mysteriously, it seems to have arisen full-blown, without any as yet identifiable local precursors.
The two concluding paragraphs of the China Daily article offer both encouragement and a warning:
[The museum] encourages oracle bone enthusiasts to use cloud computing and Big Data to analyze and support their interpretation of a particular character.
If plagiarism or falsification are found, applicants will be considered disqualified to receive the award, the museum warned.
This news about looking for obscure, old characters fits right in with the story about the megamassive "China Font Bank" covered in this post just a few days ago:
"How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
And now I hasten to bring this exciting news from the National Museum of Chinese Writing in Anyang City to the attention of my penurious paleographer pals!
[h.t. June Teufel Dreyer]
Jonathan Smith said,
October 28, 2016 @ 11:57 am
What the…
Persons less lazy then myself who track down the original announcement, please post here; I have a debt to collect :P
AntC said,
October 28, 2016 @ 3:52 pm
Inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones … date back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC).
Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used writing system in the world.
Is that entirely accurate? Egyptian hieroglyphics seems to be a fair bit older, but I guess fail on the "continuously used". OTOH if the oracle bones now need deciphering, they haven't been continuously used either. Written Sanskrit is about the same vintage(?)
The logograms convey both meaning and pronunciation. The author can't be a regular reader of Victor's posts on LL ;-)
Victor Mair said,
October 28, 2016 @ 4:39 pm
From an archeologist who specializes on Early China:
I think this oracle-bone character bounty idea is fundamentally misguided, but sadly symptomatic of the National Museum of Chinese Characters and research funding in China more generally. The museum itself has been surrounded in controversy since its founding, including officials arrested and some that perhaps should have been, "taking the money and running" as they say. The exhibition itself was written (ostensibly) by a professor who, rumour has it, was connected with the officials in charge of the museum's founding, for a very large commission fee (6 million RMB). While I can't substantiate any of this, I can substantiate that the actual writing of the exhibit texts was farmed out to people who couldn't read classical Chinese, likely used google translate for the English (or if they didn't they should have) and cut and pasted entire paragraphs from the internet. One memorable example was in an exhibit about classes of characters and specifically 象形字 for which the entry for Zi 自 was chosen from the Shuowen jiezi. The Shuowen's 自鼻也象鼻形 was translated as something like : "Zi is a nose, shaped like an elephant's nose". Clearly whoever mistranslated it into English misunderstood the original passage in classical Chinese. Other exhibits included biographical information about famous paleographers cut and pasted from the internet. The entire museum is a good example of why the Chinese government should take a less heavy handed approach to funding research (and museums) in China. To me this bounty for oracle-bone characters seems like something that could only have been cooked up by an official with no understanding of scholarship in general or oracle-bone paleography in particular. Why not offer grants for paleographic research and leave the actual research agendas up to scholars? That strikes me as a much more productive approach.
More specifically, the problem with the decipherment bounty is that the majority of undeciphered graphs in the oracle-bones are people and place names. The rest generally already have a more or less controversial reading by one or more scholars. When another, new reading is offered for the prize, who would decide on whether it was the "correct" reading and therefore deciphered? The idea of throwing technology at it is equally mindless. We already have online concordances with every example known for every character – for most problematic characters there are only a few examples. How would cloud computing solve a fundamental lack of data and basic problem of indeterminacy?
Chris Button said,
October 29, 2016 @ 12:12 pm
When another, new reading is offered for the prize, who would decide on whether it was the "correct" reading and therefore deciphered?
That's what I was wondering too. There are plenty of "known" characters whose exact interpretation is still up for debate.
Mark Mandel said,
October 30, 2016 @ 1:42 am
If this were in the US I would expect a swarm of wacko fringe theories. China? Jes' mought be.
Jichang Lulu said,
October 30, 2016 @ 4:42 am
If Shuowen entries are consistently translated as illustrated by the archaeologist who specialises on Early China, we're going to discover a proliferation of elephants, not to mention Elephant Men.
身，躳也。象人之形。
I can already see the headlines.
Y said,
October 30, 2016 @ 6:19 pm
…encourages oracle bone enthusiasts to use cloud computing and Big Data to analyze and support their interpretation of a particular character.
Seems like a complete non-sequitur, but it shows the museum's marketing prowess.
R. Fenwick said,
October 30, 2016 @ 9:28 pm
@AntC:
Egyptian hieroglyphics seems to be a fair bit older, but I guess fail on the "continuously used". OTOH if the oracle bones now need deciphering, they haven't been continuously used either.
Much of the oracle bone writing system is understood already and only individual glyphs, not the entire writing system, need decipherment. The problem is simply that, although the modern Chinese writing system is a direct descendant of the system seen on the Shang oracle bones, the character forms have undergone gradual modification over the course of millennia. This modification has in some cases been sufficiently small that the link between the modern character and the oracle bone character is obvious. 目 mù "eye", for instance. For other characters, though, the modification has been such that the relationship between a Shang form and a modern form is no longer clear. For many of these they have to be deciphered from context, and context isn't always sufficient to allow that to be done easily.